They don't come much tougher than Jack Poole, the multimillionaire Vancouver real estate developer. Yet when his pal, British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell, asked him to head up the city's bid for the 2010 Olympics, Mr. Poole agreed to sideline himself in the middle of a hot construction market to work gratis - and pay his own expenses - as chair of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

"I joke that I gave him his first job and he gave me my last," Mr. Poole said of Mr. Campbell in 2002. "I paid him $2.50 an hour (as a labourer waterproofing basements on a construction project near Smithers B.C.) and he pays me $1 a year. So who got the best deal?" he asked jokingly of the province and the city he has called home since the early 1960s.

For nearly a decade, nothing deterred Mr. Poole, including devastating treatment for pancreatic cancer. He built the bid team, oversaw the lobbying and marketing effort, which resulted in the IOC choosing Vancouver as the site for the games by a slender three vote margin over Pyeongchang, South Korea, endured a frustrating plebiscite campaign which resoundingly endorsed the IOC decision--to fulfill a rash campaign promise made by mayoralty candidate Larry Campbell--and navigated the inevitable cost overruns and political turmoil that stuck like mud patties to the construction of the Olympic venues and facilities.

"He's tough," Mr. Campbell said in 2003, in the early days of his single term as mayor. "I look at him and think, I don't want to go up an alley with this guy. He's a hockey player. He didn't get that nose from not getting into the corners. I don't find him intimidating, but I find him to be straight on at you. He's never lied to me, good news or bad news, and I really respect that."

For Mr. Poole, the Olympics were the final test in a career with as many peaks and plunges as a small town roller coaster. "All my life I have had spectacular successes, and just as spectacular failures. I've learned, with the failures, to bear them, and with the successes to savour them. They are the ones that make the failures worth bearing," he confided in an interview in 2003.

A horribly smashed leg from a car accident when he was a teenager, which left him with an ugly scar snaking up his right leg, a stiff ankle and a slight limp, ruined his dreams of a hockey career. The recession of the early 1980s toppled his first, precariously leveraged, real estate empire. It took all of his blunt-spoken persuasion - honed during his days as a door to door salesman - to salvage the business from foreclosure by a network of bankers.

From those debacles he learned how to regroup and to hone his laissez-faire management style. More of a big-picture guy than a details person, he realized that his best leadership attribute was an ability to spot talent, give smart people opportunities to make decisions and to take pleasure from standing back and watching them succeed.

"What makes me the most proud," he said a year before the Games were to open, "is to witness the growth and development of that bright young executive team [at VANOC]. That's what I call psychological income. You need that payback so that you can say to yourself, ‘I really am growing.' It is not a dollar-and-cents thing, it is a psychological thing. I just believe in that so strongly. That's what's given me my satisfaction in life, with all of my business experiences. It is to recruit young people who are self-motivated, want to succeed, have a strong work ethic, and then to give them the freedom to act and see them grow."

Even so, he knew the stakes were high with this one. Taking on the Olympics was a massive undertaking not only for him, but for the province and the country. The process forced the two levels of government to work together, a legacy that he felt was even more important than winning the chance to host the games. "If we don't deliver a win, we're going to take a tremendous hit, because the government is giving us everything we're asking for," Mr. Poole said just before the IOC announced its decision. "If we can't deliver a win with that, it's not going to look good on my resume, I can tell you that."

As the deadline for the Games approached, the question on everybody's mind was whether Mr. Poole could defy the medical odds in an even bigger struggle. In the past he had joked about carrying the Olympic torch through his home town of Mortlach, Sask., on its journey from Athens to Vancouver. "It might be fun, if time allowed, to be there when the torch goes through, but the chances are I'd probably fall down," he joked last summer.

Nobody is laughing now. Mr. Poole held off until after the Olympic Torch was ignited in Athens and then died peacefully in Vancouver. He was 76.

John (Jack) Wilson Poole was born (April 14, 1933) 40 km west of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in a house without electricity or plumbing, in a community so tiny that it barely rates a dot on most maps. He was the youngest of three sons of John Vigors Poole and his wife Edith (née Golen) Poole. Mr. Poole worked at the grain elevator after his Massey-Harris farm equipment dealership went broke during the Depression and Mrs. Poole was the local postmistress.

If you looked at lanky Jack Poole carefully, you could find traces of his First Nations heritage (5 per cent Cree) in his high cheek bones and dark eyes, but he never made much publicly of his First Nations status until he was awarded the National Aboriginal Achievement Award in the business and commerce category in March, 2007.

His claim came through an 18th century British ancestor who had arrived in Moose Factory on James Bay, in what is now Ontario, in 1776. He worked for the Hudson's Bay Company and married a Cree woman. "I think I'm six generations removed from the Cree lady," Mr. Poole said after the awards ceremony, "but I have a Métis card, and by definition, in Canada, I'm an aboriginal person. I've always been very proud of this fact-to have Canadian roots that go that far back."

In a profile of Jack Poole for B.C. Business Magazine, Gary Mason wrote that he "idolized his parents, even his alcoholic father who ruined many a Christmas by getting drunk before noon." Aside from his drinking bouts, John Poole was a nurturing father, who "bathed" his son in praise, helping him develop "a high self-esteem not common among children of alcoholics." The elder Poole also imparted two character building lessons: don't be quick to judge others; and live your life with integrity.

Along with his older brothers, Jack spent grades one through 12 in a two room schoolhouse; outside the classroom he played hockey and dreamt of playing defence in the NHL. That goal was shattered the summer he was 15 and working as crew on a highway paving project outside Lloydminster, on the border with Alberta. One night, as he and some friends walked into town after dark, a car sideswiped them, leaving his best friend dead by the side of the road and him with a smashed right leg. "I remember my lower right leg was mangled and hanging on by the skin," he told the Vancouver Province in 2002. On the long and excruciating train journey back to Moose Jaw to have his triple compound fracture repaired, he managed a couple of philosophical insights about life: it can change in a flash; and it consists of a series of obstacles to be overcome with perseverance ingenuity and grit. For the rest of his days, he bore a long, ugly scar running upward from his stiff right ankle and walked with a slight limp.

Life whacked him again when, aged 16, he impregnated his high school girlfriend, Marilyn Pollock. While most kids his age, back in the 1950s, were thinking about jobs and a date for the senior prom, he became a hasty bridegroom and the teenaged father of a baby girl. Two years later, the Pooles had a second daughter.

By then, he was enrolled in civil engineering at the University of Saskatchewan-all those summers swallowing dust on construction projects had inspired him to acquire the credentials to run job sites.

He graduated in 1954, the same year that he won the heavyweight wrestling championship at U of S, and immediately began working as a management trainee at Gulf Oil in Calgary.

On the side he sold Fuller Brush products door to door to supplement the family income, using a sales routine that he could re-enact half a century later. "You knock on the door, somebody opens, and you shoot that aerosol hand cream in their hands and you say: ‘Now, rub it in, then put your hands under the tap. It's like an invisible glove of lanolin.'" Swearing that it really did feel that way, Mr. Poole bragged that "there wasn't anyone who didn't buy that hand cream," in an interview with The Globe's Rod Mickelburgh by way of showcasing his selling prowess before the final Olympic pitch in Prague in June, 2003.

The Pooles' third child, a boy named William John, was born in Calgary, suffering from Myelomeningocele, the severest form of spina bifida. "I had a terrible decision to make," Mr. Poole said in BC Business, explaining why he placed the baby, whose head had grown to the size of a watermelon shortly after birth, in an institution. He died nine months later.

After two years at Gulf Oil, Mr. Poole found his calling: heading up the construction division of Engineered Homes in Edmonton. He did so well that he was transferred to Vancouver to start up a West Coast office in the early 1960s. Just as EH won a contract to build a hundred homes for a mining company in northern B.C., the head office in Calgary took a financial tumble and called Mr. Poole back home. He didn't want to go.

Instead, he persuaded Graham Dawson, son of the man who had built the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver, to buy EH's B.C. assets and form a new company called Daon Development Corporation. Initially they build housing in resource towns from Prince Rupert to Port Alice, but eventually the company burgeoned into one of the second largest real estate and development empire in North America. Park Place Tower on Burrard and the Daon Tower on West Hastings are only two of their buildings from that era.

Daon's exponential growth was fuelled by taking on massive debts at stratospheric interest rates. When the 1982 recession hit, customers vanished and Daon owned $2.3-billion to 47 banks at staggering interest rates of more than 20 per cent. Mr. Poole was so stressed, he was physically ill. The company survived, but it took two years, more than $20-million in legal fees and a protection plan that saw the banks taking back shares in the Daon.

"My personal wealth went from a paper worth of $100-million to a negative worth of $5-million," he told Mr. Mason in B.C. Business. Amidst the chaos, his marriage, which had survived the birth of four daughters and the death of his only son, foundered. When the Pooles divorced in 1983, after more than 30 years of marriage, he had nothing but debts.

Bizarrely, life was both tough and blessed, for it was about this time, as he was crawling back to solvency-Bell Canada Enterprises had acquired 68 per cent of Daon's common shares by March 1985 -that he met Darlene Young, a Liberal politico and an employee of the public relations firm, McFarlane, Morris and Peacock. They married on March 21, 1987. Two years later, when he finally resigned from BCE Developments, reportedly with $20-million in profits in his pocket.

Through a friend, Mr. Poole met David Podmore, a key player on Expo 86 in Vancouver, just as the exhibition was wrapping up and Mr. Podmore was sniffing around for new projects. A day after their initial meeting, Mr. Podmore began working for Mr. Poole, a close business relationship that continued for the rest Mr. Poole's life.

Together, with a group of people including labour leader Ken Georgetti, they formed Vancouver Land Corporation (VLC) on June 1, 1989, a private/public company capitalized by union pension funds, and engaged in a joint venture to build low cost housing in Vancouver, under the encouraging eye of his pal and fellow Liberal, Mayor Gordon Campbell, himself a former property developer. Although VLC promised to build 2,000 rental units in exchange for long term leases on vacant city land, valued at close to $50-million, it fell short by 200 units because, according to Mr. Poole, Vancouver stopped providing the land.

VLC moved into market-rate condos when the rental market fell apart and then morphed into Greystone Properties in the early 1990s when Mr. Poole linked up with Las Vegas gambling mogul Steve Wynn to build Seaport Centre, a $750-million casino/convention and cruise ship terminal on the waterfront in Vancouver. Public qualms about gambling led to the project being killed by the government, although it was revived successfully by other developers later on.

Eventually Greystone became Concert Properties, which is now one of the largest and most successful construction companies in the province, with a working capital of some $750-million and an asset base of slightly less than $1.5-billion. Mr. Poole pushed himself upstairs on June 1, 1992, as chair of the board, fulfilling a promise he had made to Mr. Podmore, to make him president and CEO within three years when the two men first went into business together.

Mr. Poole's money management and previous construction dealings came under intense scrutiny when his former employee Gordon Campbell, by then Premier of B.C., appointed him Chair of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) in 2003. The IOC had insisted that Vancouver cost its bid in 2002 dollars. Even though the bid team prudently budgeted a contingency fund of $139-million, and Mr. Poole publicly insisted that "We've tried very hard to deliver a business plan that would be bulletproof," costs rose astronomically.

Mr. Poole's shortfall, more than a decade earlier, in building low cost rental housing units for the city, fuelled a political furor when his company, Concert Properties was short listed as one of the developers to be issued a Request for Proposal for the multi-million dollar Athletes Village on False Creek in Vancouver. All Concert is doing is learning what the request for proposals will be. That's all. There's certainly no conflict right now, and if there is, Concert will withdraw or I'll resign," he said in response to the conflict of interest allegations. Within 24 hours, Concert had bowed out of any dealings with the Olympics.

In fact, as Mr. Podmore complained two years before the start of The Games, taking on big civic projects such as chairing VANOC, is bad, rather than good for business. Both he and Mr. Poole approached the board of Concert, asking if they should be involved in the Olympics, considering they would be working for free, and the board responded by saying, "This is important for the community. We want you to do it," according to Mr. Podmore.

Life walloped Mr. Poole again in 2007 when, nearly 25 years after he had survived prostate cancer, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the most lethal and aggressive forms of the disease. Refusing to succumb passively to a death sentence, he had surgery in Vancouver and then signed up for a $60,000 experimental course of treatment at Virginia Mason Medical Centre in Seattle, Washington. For 40 days he was bombarded with radiation, topped by toxic doses of chemotherapy three times a week.

"What should I do? Sit in a dark room? Can you imagine me doing that? Frankly, It's just getting into more exciting things now with two years to go before the Olympics and I want to be there in the middle of it," he told Jeff Lee of the Vancouver Sun in November, 2007.

Looking back on the brutal regime and a subsequent infection that had left him so gaunt that close friends barely recognized him, he confessed recently that, "it puts you on your knees."

This past June, Mr. Poole stepped back again at Concert Properties, becoming Chair emeritus, so that his protége, Mr. Podmore, could move into his mentor's old role as Chair of the board. A month later, he was back under the surgeon's scalpel within months. In a five hour operation, doctors removed one malignant tumour containing pancreatic cancer cells from his intestine, but were unable to remove another mass because of its location.

"This is not the way the story was supposed to go," he told Globe columnist Gary Mason in July. "Recovery is taking longer than expected, but I'm getting a little better day by day. It's baby steps, as they say. But I hope to be back to work soon. You know, you just deal with what you're handed. You have no choice, do you?"

John (Jack) Poole was born in Mortlach Saskatchewan on April 13, 1933. He died of complications from pancreatic cancer in hospital in Vancouver early on Oct. 23, 2009. Mr. Poole, who was 76, is survived by his second wife Darlene, four daughters, a stepson and his extended family.